Kevin Cameron has been writing about motorcycles for nearly 50 years, first for Cycle magazine and, since 1992, for <em>Cycle World</em>. (Robert Martin/)
Years ago my mother said to me, her grown-up and presumably worldly son, “You know, if it hadn’t been for me, you’d still be wearing sailor suits.”
Once we get used to things being a certain way, change can make us uncomfortable. But sometimes the change is so obviously for the better that it is embraced at once. Think of Elliot Morris’s seven-spoke mag wheels, which began to appear in late 1973. The only word of objection I heard was racer John Long’s father, intoning with amusement that “If God had intended motorcycles to have cast wheels, he would have created them so.”
Suddenly tubeless operation was easy.
The same goes for sequential foot-shift, put in its final form by Velocette race manager and wordsmith Harold Willis in 1927. Sure, there are still a few future-phobic Harley guys who yearn to take a hand off the bars to grasp a manly tank-shift lever, and they are welcome.
Tank shifters like the one on this 1936 Harley EL eventually yielded to the new innovation known as foot shifting. (National Motorcycle Museum/)
In the mid-1920s the established form of the British motorcycle, long, low, and slight of frame, was callously discarded. Sporting singles adopted the bulbous saddle tank, which fit over the frame’s top tube, rather than being a flat soldered box between upper and lower top tubes; a short, fast-turning wheelbase; and disruptively tall overhead valve engines. When I learned about this change, I wondered: Who were the thoughtless criminals behind all this? George Brough and Howard R. Davies, that’s who. Big, big names in their own right. Maybe, to the then-fading generation of pre-World War I riders, this change was a sad reminder of their own decline.
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Much the same attitude greeted the absolutely necessary coming of electronic rider aids, first to the harsh, twitchy two-stroke 500s of the 1990s, then to MotoGP, and now to production bikes. Many times I heard the sentiment repeated: “If it was up to me, I’d rip all the electronics off those bikes and let ‘em go man to man!”
Never mind that on the eve of this electronics revolution in the late 1980s, the FIM was quivering in its boots lest the Gray Men of Brussels, who set EU policy, notice the parade of GP riders on their way to hospitals after corner-exit highsides. There may still be extremists who relish injuries, welcoming them as morbid gender validation. But manufacturers, corporate sponsors, and race team managers know that top riders in pain and plaster earn zero points and that their injuries called motorcycling itself into question. The world had moved on from the days when, as Kel Carruthers once noted, you avoided paddock friendships because you knew that four or five of you wouldn’t be there next spring at Alicante.
This early Buell RW750 was fitted with fiberglass bodywork influenced by the fairings developed for late ’60s H-D roadracers. It didn’t go over well. (Buell Motorcycle/)
Another possibility is that a technology may work but people don’t like it. Erik Buell, knowing that Harley’s 1968 Caltech fairing was an important element in their Triumph-crushing Daytona dominance circa 1968-69, put a version on one of his production models. Motorcyclists, accustomed to the endless scoops, zigzags, and sharp edges flowing from F-104-loving stylists, rejected it as “the Whale.” Erik likes things that work, but perhaps for the riding public other considerations come first (“what does owning this bike tell my Facebook friends about me?”).
Some time ago I was asked to research a story on automatic motorcycle transmissions, and was reminded that manufacturers have quietly offered them again and again, but finding few takers, eventually took the tax break of donating unsold stock to tech schools.
The Rolling Stones once sang, “…he can’t be a man ‘cause he doesn’t smoke/the same cigarettes as me.” For years, something similar kept the clutch averse among us away from motorcycles. Do Formula One drivers suffer declining sperm counts because they no longer take a hand off the wheel in a 4G turn to operate a 1901-style gear-change lever? Just like old Howard Davies, they are going to do whatever works best.
Now it seems some progress is being made, and the 98 percent of auto drivers who have never driven anything but an automatic may find a few motorcycle models that tempt them.
I don’t remember hearing much objection when rear suspension with a hard 3 inches of travel (those black screw-top Girling suspension units did look cool though) was replaced in the mid-1970s by much longer-travel arrangements, giving riders a wonderful increase in tire grip (and therefore in stability!) over rough surfaces. There are collectors who stand to attention before the Triumph and BSA “desert sleds” of long ago. That’s fine, but let’s not glorify needing to pee every 15 minutes as a legacy of hammering up and down Baja on such things.
Technology doesn’t go away—it intensifies. So there’s plenty of scope ahead for being upset by winglets, electric bikes, variable ride height, radar, and all the emerging gadgetry of the future. Remember that today’s cool radical, ready for anything at age 20, can become a staunch conservative as four or five decades rush past, rejecting change and croaking about a heroic age “when men were men.”
